There are occasional cases where nurses damage patients, in the same way as there are occasional cases where doctors do the same.
The only case I can recall of a GP doing this is Dr Harold Shipman, who murdered 250 patients in his career in Northern England.
The fallout of the Dr Shipman case has been an ever tightening of the bureaucratic noose for every single doctor in the country: our practices are going to be microinspected by CQC, we will have to undergo revalidation as well as appraisal, and the NHS will be supervising every clinical decision, it seems.
Will the nurses have to undergo the same degree of supervision, now this has happened?
I doubt it.
5 comments:
Revalidation for nurses is on the horizon JD. Key in NMC Revalidation.
Anna :o]
Shipman wasn't the worst case. Perhaps the most notorious doctor ever to have practised for the NHS was John Bodkin Adams, who escaped conviction because of political interference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bodkin_Adams
Now now JD, look at the numbers. We only ever kill a handfull before we get caught. Doctors on the other hand (Shipman as you mentioned) are much more adept and manage hundreds.
Was Shipman much more adept or were the Heath Authority just that more stupid?
Perhaps you have a point about the numbers. but look at the victims. The nurse in Grantham a few years ago targeted children. The nurse in this case (if the charges are correct) randomly killed patients without even having to look them in the eye. A random kind of callousness surely?
It is all about trust and the betrayal of that trust. The numbers are not the issue.
The truth is that it was not incompetence in Shipman's case. He knew his stuff and he knew how to. Yet politicians and the GMC had no idea.
Simple head count does not work that well as it did not take into account of local demographics although if one GP out of 8 have an exceptionally high mortality, alarm bells should ring.
Deliberate murders that remain undetected has to do with incompetence, but not that of the murderer.
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